Cowon's latest flash-based portable media player, the iAudio 7, certainly looks promising on the surface. There's its sleek black design, interesting button array, and touted powerful output for high-end, power-hungry headphones. Add to this to the long battery life that Cowon players are known for and you have the possibility of a nice portable music device. Once the tiny, low-resolution screen lights up, however, much of the player's mystique vanishes. Photos and videos look lousy, and videos have to be resized before they will work on the player at all. The iAudio 7 offers powerful output, decent audio file support, and customizable EQ settings, but when you factor in the paltry video performance, only a player with an annoying interface and low-res graphics remains.

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The iAudio 7 is horizontally oriented for the sake of video playback. The 1.3-inch LCD screen takes up the left half of the player's front panel. Interesting touch-sensitive controls (three indentations that, together, resemble an off-kilter division symbol) rest on the right of the front face. The division-symbol buttons light up when the player is on and reveal a play/pause button (that also acts as Enter sometimes), a multifunction button, and backward/forward arrows. On top, from left to right, we have a mic, a power/hold switch, a Menu button, and volume controls. The left side of the device has a line-in jack for recording and a headphone jack. The right end of the iAudio 7 houses a mini USB port and reset control (hidden behind a protective plastic cover).

The player comes with a CD manual and JetAudio, Cowon's media software. It's no match for Windows Media Player when it comes to ease of useI suggest using the JetAudio software only when video conversions need to be done. If you want any video at all, you'll have to use the conversion software, which is just a bit faster than real time and creates files that often suffer from aspect-ratio issues. Also included is a surprisingly decent pair of earphones. They don't sound wonderful, but sliding on the included cloth earpiece covers keeps them firmly in place, and they pump out respectable bass. I always recommend upgrading your headphones, but it's not as essential here as it is with, say, an iPod.

Ironically, it seems as if Cowon might actually be encouraging consumers to upgrade. The early buzz about Cowon's graceful-looking, sleekly designed iAudio 7 was that it had a particularly powerful output to drive "audiophile grade" headphones. When I put the player to the test with a bulky pair of $1,000 Grado headphones, this assertion proved to be true. The Grados, however, also sounded great with my iPod nano, and in a head-to-head test, the iPod didn't distort the Grados at top volume and was able to get a bit louder than the iAudio 7, which suffered some low-end distortion at high volumes. In addition, the iriver clix had nearly identical output to the iAudio 7 with the Grados, and at pleasant listening levels, all players sounded excellent. In other words, the powerful output may be a selling point, but it's not a real advantage against the chief competitors.

Audio file support on the iAudio is pretty decent. The player can handle MP3s of all bit rates; WMA; and, for the higher-end, lossless fiends, OGG, FLAC, and WAV. Does it play iTunes Plus DRM-free AAC? Sorry, that's a negativeno AAC support here, DRM or not. Photo support is weak tooonly JPEGs. For video, you can resize AVI, Xvid, or MPEG4 to 15-frames-per-second, 160-by-120 video files using the included software. Even if aspect ratios weren't brutalized by the conversion, you're still looking at a 1.3-inch screenit's kind of like watching video on a Starburst fruit chew.

Menu navigation is another sore spot. These days, iPods aren't the only players with graceful interfaces. The iriver clix gen 2 is also fun to navigate, and the graphics look amazing. Samsung and Sansa also integrate fairly straightforward menu systems with good visuals into their player lines. Why is Cowon stuck using a convoluted interface with graphics that look like a throwback to the mid-1990s?

The most useful button is the Menu button on the top of the player. I found myself pressing it all the time to return to the main screen, because it's easy to get lost in one of the iAudio 7's foldersyes, it uses folders with folder icons (you can't get any less sexy), not a menu. Toggling between the red multifunction button and Menu seems to be the quickest way to navigate, but the path is not always clear. In certain screens, pressing the red multifunction button, for instance, takes you to a folder-by-folder list of what looks like a slightly more detailed main menu. I couldn't figure out what "PICTURE" stands for either. You might expect to find your photos here . . . but you won't. Those are placed under "Photo Files" (which for some reason is the only folder in the page that's not in all capital letters). I was surprised to see a folder for every photo file type I tried loading on the player here. When I clicked on the BMP folder in Photo Files, however, I got a cryptic message stating "No Picture File." Huh?

It turns out that these are all the files on the player, including photos from my test suite that loaded onto the player but can't be displayed because they are incompatible. This is actually a useful featurea visual reference if you want to use your player as a portable hard drive.next: A Painful Interface

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